Or… stuff and nonsense.

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Monthly Archives: August 2003

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Now, what exciting things have I been up to this weekend, chaps and chapesses?

Well, other than getting series 1 & 2 of Coupling and watching most of series 1 last night and the “extras” on the second disc of series 2 tonight, I’ve mostly been fighting off a bad sinus attack and losing.

Last night I tried hard to not take Anadin tablets as they upset my stomach but unfortunately they seem to be the only pain killers which have any effect on the sinuses.. At 9:15 I gave in and took a couple and went straight to bed. Almost immediately I fell asleep, which was a good thing.

This mornign I thought that I’d got lucky and didn’t have the standard 2nd day of sinus headache, but during the day the tell-tale signs of pressure behind the nose started to appear and tonight I’ve again had to settle for Anadin for any relief.

That’s really been my weekend.

Still, it has meant that with the early night I’ve caught up on the sleep I lost last week from the strange dreams.

And now, it’s time to go to bed, ready for another week at the office. I don’t know why I bother sometimes. Life can be such a grind.

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Just in case any of those out there who do happen across this journal want to know, Virgin Megastore in Oxford are currently selling series 1 and 2 of Coupling as part of their 3 for £25 promotion. The only problem is finding another DVD that you haven’t already got, that’s watchable and is worth the £8.33 it will effectively cost you.

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Once I got to the opening of track 6, Echoes, it reminded me of an early 70’s BBC popular science programme, the name of which escapes me, which used that opening sequence from the track as backing music for quite a lot of the shots. It made me remember how those science programmes used to make me feel. They instilled a sense of wonder and beauty.

I think that’s what’s missing from today’s cynical, sensational, in your face science programmes.. a sense of beauty and wonder.

I’m not sure that if I grew up today I’d have the same sense of curiosity and willing to try to understand things. Firstly, there are these awful current crop of science programmes and secondly there are no Open University programmes on inthe mornings, especially Sunday mornings, which I used to enjoy looking at and trying to understand.

I’m sure it’s a lot harder for people growing up these days to get a sense of awe from the Universe and the endeavour to understand it from the media. I can sort of see why media studies is becoming a more popular ‘A’ level and the sciences are becoming far less so. If there’s no wonder or beauty where’s the fun?

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Many, many years ago I remember having a dream where my Dad, myself and my Dad’s brother and wife went for a walk starting from my childhood home in Houghton Conquest, up Ampthill hill and eventually to the outskirts of Luton (which was about 20 miles away) and then returning.

Last night I had a revisitation of this dream, except that in this case it was a journey back to Houghton Conquest from my parent’s house in Cornwall and this time it was only my Dad walking with me.

It’s very strange how dreams which are so separated in time can be serialised on such a way, don’t you think?

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I got my car serviced today. 30,000 mile service (even though my car’s only done 19,800 miles) plus I foolishly told them that if the front tyres needed changing they should do so…

£643 !!!!!!!!!!!

OUCH!

Next year, seeing as the car will be out of warrenty by then, I’ll be joining the SAAB owners’ club and finding a non-main dealer SAAB specialist for my servicing. Maybe then it will go from extorsionate down to merely down right expensive.

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In that time I’ve totally failed to arrange to go and see Terminator 3 and done little else, really.

Yesterday’s fun included getting my hair cut, disposing of the iMac at work which got drowned and buying a new, bigger and very much more quiet hard disk for my laptop.

It’s amazing how I coped with the old laptop disk for so long. Not only was it only 5GB which had to be split in two for Windows and Linux, so neither had enough space, but it was flippin noisey. I mean it whirred at a level that in a quiet house you could hear it in the bedroom upstairs when the machine was in the living room. It also clicked and clonked as it did its job. And no, it wasn’t faulty, it was merely the way an IBM Travelstar sounds.

The new disk is 40GB and you can hardly hear it in a quiet room when you’ve got the laptop on your lap. It also seems faster too.

As for today. Well, I’m going to be tidying a great deal. I’m also going to wash the car which seems to have a dust layer so thick that it’s more beige than black at the moment.

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Whilst I was showering this morning I got into an idle thought mode and thinking strange things, as you do when doing mundane tasks..

I got to thinking how you’d make an accurate protractor using nothing other than a straight edge, a compass (not the north pointing kind) and a sharp pencil.

I determined that you could do it as long as you didn’t mark the divisions in degrees as below 45 degrees all the divisions would be fractional if you used the simple technique of sub-dividing an angle. (ie. from the origin make a chord which passes through lines from the origin subtending the angle, then find the point equidistant from each of the points of intersection between the lines and the cords and draw a line from the origin through the equidistant point.)

Surely, therefore, it would be better to have the circle divided into degrees which were based upon a power of two? In that way the whole set of marks on a protractor etc. could be generated by simple angle subdivision. Far easier and far more logical.

Of course, we can blame the current (non-radian) division of a circle on the Babylonians.. they have a lot to answer for do those Babylonians.